Vegan Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto

In my mind, pesto = bliss. I have a classic basil pesto recipe that I make all the time during the summer, and I can never get enough. (You can find the recipe HERE.) Tonight I had a very small bunch of basil on hand, and I wanted pesto but I knew that it was not enough to cover a pound of pasta. Luckily, I also had a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in the refrigerator, so I whipped up a batch of sun-dried tomato and basil pesto. It turned out really well, and all the kids devoured it, even the baby. This was a surprise because my 5 year old does not usually like pesto, and he actually went for thirds tonight. Yay! I hope you enjoy this as much as my family did.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes*

6 Tbsp pine nuts

4 medium cloves garlic (or more)

1 tsp salt

2 cups loosely packed fresh basil

4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

freshly ground black pepper to taste

Preparation:

Place sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, garlic, and salt into a food processor, and process briefly. (It will be chunky). Add basil, and process again. Add olive oil, and process until fairly smooth. Add nutritional yeast and process to combine.

Toss pesto with pasta (pictured above is whole wheat spaghetti – I used 1 lb) or potato gnocchi. You can add a little bit of the pasta cooking water to make it easier to toss, if you like. You could also spread this on a nice, hearty artisan bread, use as a sandwich filling, or spread on pizza.

* Don’t worry about trying to get the tomatoes separated from the oil that they are packed in when measuring out 1/2 cup. I took this oil into account when specifying the amount of extra virgin olive oil to add to the recipe.